Mar 22 2009
Conservatives are rarely cast as optimists, but rather as curmudgeonly nay-sayers pining for days gone by. There is some truth in this, as conservatives do genuinely lament that what once was is no more. Thinking about this today, I was suddenly struck with a recollection from reading Kierkegaard. In his exposition of The Unhappy Man, [...]
Mar 18 2009
Apropos of Nathan’s post on Aristocracy below, I came across this speech by C.S. Lewis on a very similar topic. I highly recommend you read “The Inner Ring.”
Mar 18 2009
A friend engaged me in conversation about this David Brooks piece yesterday. Brooks is probably my favorite writer in mainstream journalism, and a really good foil for traditionalist conservatives such as myself. My friend expected me to disagree with Brooks’s premise that our fair country was at heart a commercial republic. I’m not quite sure what [...]
Mar 10 2009
The following quote is a perfect example why the ineffable concept of ‘The Market’ (particularly when prefaced with “free”) is the quintessential embodiment of relativism: Tabling the ethics of human embryo research for the moment, the only ethical way for any scientific decisions to be made is by the market. The market is unbiased and efficient. [...]
Mar 09 2009
Below you find the first of, hopefully, many posts to come from my friend, Nathan. I invited Nathan to guest-blog/co-blog both because I thought his post (which was originally part of an email thread) was excellent and because two irregular-because-of-grad-school posters were better than one. So now Protestant Pontifications has two Anglican conservatives dishing it [...]
Mar 09 2009
The Front Porch Republic article is quite good in distinguishing the kind of conservative Brooks is–namely, an Oakeshottian–from the pedigree of Burke. A more simplistic way to put it is in Mansfield’s terms: are we go slow conservatives or go back conservatives? Brooks and Oakeshott at the end of the day subscribe to a secular, [...]
Mar 07 2009
If you haven’t heard of Front Porch Republic yet, you should go check it out. One of my new favorite blogs (and one of the few I take the time to keep up with). I want to recommend this excellent piece on Burkean conservatism, since, if you hadn’t noticed, that’s kind of my thing.
Mar 06 2009
I’ve been participating in an active email thread (incited by me sharing this) with some people and, as is tpyical for this group, conservatism came up. I thought I’d post some excerpts of my comments: Conservatism is a temperament, and it is a modern one. It developed as a reaction to the philosophies and social [...]
Mar 03 2009
I’m not going to get into the embarassing details of Obama’s budget plans, but take a look at our new Recovery.gov website. Is this administration that out of touch? Do they have any flipping clue that the people actually getting screwed over by the economy right now are not the sort who are assuaged by [...]
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Protestant Pontifications
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